If I were to make a website about lace, I’d only do it in English (and not even bother about providing in my mother tongue German) - provided that your English is sufficiently good (but you can always let a native speaker correct it). As we already have translation tables for our lace related technical terms everybody should be able to read them. Google translations work best with English as source language. And it wont be long that everybody will have at least a basic knowledge of English. Those that don’t speak English at all should start learning NOW - they miss so much without it! I also started to learn Spanish a few months ago (though I’m already 52 - but it’s never too late). A whole new world opens up with a new language (I often end up on very interesting web pages, forums and blogs that I would never have found without some basic knowledge of Spanish to put into the search enginges). But I don’t see Spanish evolving into a world language, even though there are more native speakers of Spanish than English (only topped by Chinese). English apparently has won that race already. We even mostly speak English at my work place now, since there’s not only Germans but people from all over Europe and the rest of the world working with us (including Russia and the Ukraine). It really helps if there’s a „lowest common denominator“ - I really love how easy it’s become to get around in Europe with nearly all younger people speaking English wherever you happen to travel. With one exception: England itself with all of its strong dialects which I! often find very difficult to understand.
Oops, sorry for the wall of text - I studied linguistics a long time ago and it’s still one of my hobby horses. So to answer your question at long last: better make the whole website available in English. You might still use Dutch for a personal blog, as it’s always easier to get your thoughts over in your native tongue (and Dutch is such a likable language!). Germans are usually able to read Dutch, even without learning and being able to understand spoken Dutch, especially if they also know English and the northern dialects of German. Best from damp and rather hot Berlin, Achim. > Now I have a question. I am changing my website www.kloskant.com > <http://www.kloskant.com/> to be suitable also for tablets and smartphones. In > my old website almost every page was translated in English. This is a lot of > work and I wonder if I should do that again, because it has become easier to > have it translated by google than it was when I started the website. > So my question is: should I translate every page in English or are there pages > you are not interested in, such as the information about the lessons, the lace > groups and the calendar. - To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [email protected]. For help, write to [email protected]. Photo site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacemaker/sets/
